Another Great Book by Pollan

books:


	• The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Michael Pollan Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 160 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great read for everyone

I found this book a few years ago by accident, lucky me! The information contained in thei book was fascinating. Who would have thought so much of a potato?

A Treat.

Michael Pollan's writing style is unusual, but engaging in a chatty, "round the table" type way. The content is broad and diverse. Pollan is comfortable going lateral, deviating readily to highlight some unusual aspects of the material being explored, and just as readily leading the reader on, to consider other interesting dynamics and perspectives.

I would encourage anyone interested in the Biology / Ecology type areas, and teachers in particular, to consider this book. I believe it definitely encourages one to consider fresh perspectives on (and a greater respect for) the interactions between mankind and our plant world.

(It is a book that I have already added to the "Must Read" list for my Gifted & Talented students at High School.)

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Another Great Book by Pollan

I recently finished Botany of Desire and Pollan's more recent Omnivore's Dilemma. Both books are full of great factual information about what we eat, the implications of doing such, and the forces of nature that bind us tightly with other plants and animals. I loved both of these books. It opened my eyes to so many things that were both enlightening and, at times, frightening. Even though the content of both books is full of factual information, Pollan communicates it in a fashion that makes for an enjoyable read. I suggest getting them both.

a must read

I read this after a review and it was spellbinding. The auther writes about the plant world in near magical terms. The last chapter on potatoes should be required reading for all students. Amazing book and I've already bought two and gave them away as gifts to like minded friends.

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Animistically Delicious

The aptly-named Pollan is a delicious writer, and in this book he calls into question our long-standing assumption that human consciousness allows us to be the only species which imposes our will onto other beings. Using four examples - the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato - he describes how the widespread planting of certain crops over others may have come through the plants' volition as much as through human choice. He points out that plants use animal desires to their own benefit: for example, the bumblebee chooses certain flowers over others precisely because those flowers have evolved to please bumblebees. Therefore, contrary to our initial interpretation, the bee is actually being used by the plant. Similarly, Pollan argues, humans choose certain plants to fulfill our desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control - and plants like the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato have co-evolved to best exploit these desires. So who is using whom? In an exquisite animistic introduction, Pollan points this out:

"We're prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. ... but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did as a way to conquer the trees." (p. xxi)

Pollan's writing is anything but dry. In the opening chapter, he discusses the forces by which apples spread in terms which read like a detective novel. He first reveals that apple trees never repeat their predecessors' genetic templates; in their case, ontogeny does not replicate phylogeny. In fact, every single seed will grow to become its own unique being, supremely adaptable to, and largely created by, its surroundings. All of the commercial apples we enjoy now, those with names like Jonathan or Golden Delicious, grow on cloned graftings from an original individual tree. Apple trees are therefore one glorious example of nature's continual wild experimentation.

The chapter then goes into the history of Johnny Appleseed, a major force by which apples spread across a new continent. It seems that the main vision we Americans hold of Appleseed, that of a happy-go-lucky barefoot eco-freak merrily planting seeds hither and yon for a wholesome farmer populace to enjoy a fresh apple pie after a hard day's work, is only part of the story. Actually, Pollan reveals, those early apples were not soft or sweet at all, and the only reason the folk of the harsh interior wanted them was for their capacity to be fermented into hard alcoholic cider! The mystically-inclined Appleseed is then likened to an American Dionysus, in wonderfully funny language: "He was a kind of satyr without the sex - a Protestant satyr, you might say..." (p.35).

The Botany of Desire calls into question centuries of assumptions about the dominance of human consciousness and the locus of ecological control. It illustrates important and timely ideas concerning an animistic, volitional-reciprocity world view through rigorous botanical and historical investigation, all wrapped up in a journalist's engaging writing style. Go read it, and then feed it to your friends. Who knows what might grow?

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